


To Die Would be an Awfully Big Adventure

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: #SorryNotSorry, A LOT of Angst, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, Apocalyptic World, I may have made up some words, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse, a zombe story that isn't about zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 17:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1519070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is not smiling, and Sherlock is not feeling the thrill of the game thrum beneath his skin.<br/>It's still them against the world, but this is entirely different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Die Would be an Awfully Big Adventure

**Author's Note:**

> Really Long Disclaimer: Title is from that one overused Peter Pan quote.  
> Though I would like to, I do _not_ own Sherlock BBC, or the actors and characters within it. I do take credit for the creation of these characters. All belongs to the lovely Mr. Doyle, Mr. Gatiss and Mr. Moffat. If someone affiliated with Sherlock/BBC stumbles upon this work, I would very much appreciate it if you didn't sue me!  
>  This has not been brit-picked or beta'd, so all mistakes are my own. Additionally, if there are randomly omitted letter 'F's throughout the passage, it is because my keyboard hates me.
> 
> A/N: Hello! Thank you for attempting to read my story! This is my first for the Sherlock fandom, so don't judge too harshly if the characters (mostly Sherlock) are OOC! I'm endlessly sorry if they are! Hopefully you put aside any of this work's faults, and love it regardless (wishful thinking, anyone?)!  
> Hope you enjoy, and happy reading!

_“Afghanistan or Iraq?”_

The flame in Sherlock’s trembling hand flickers. Its fuel is dwindling away, down to its last bit, but it produces enough light to see by.

_Running through the streets has never felt so invigorating. His pulse is a staccato rhythm under his skin, sweat drips into his eyes, and his breathing comes out in hot, choppy puffs. He looks to John at his right, his cheeks hurting, and almost leans in to kiss him._

The mirror is thickly coated with dust. No one’s been here for a long while, and it sure as hell shows. He stretches out a hand, wiping the powder off the mirror with the sleeve of his coat. He leaves shaky streaks on the glass, a zig-zagged, reflective clearing on the gray surface.

_John is strapped to a bomb, scared but not shaking under the scrutinization of a dozen little red lights. John is laughing with him in Buckingham Palace, giggling behind their hands like children whispering to one another in class. John is hallucinating in a lab, behind the bars of a cage, telling him to_ hurry, hurry Sherlock, please _. John is kissing him, his grin pressing to Sherlock’s lips, hesitant and warm. John is crying at a coal black gravestone with only two words engraved on it, telling it just how much he owes the man who is not buried there._

He has not seen his own face in years, and, without looking, wonders if he’s changed much. He wonders if the age shows on his face, if there are hints of gray in his hair. Maybe all his restless nights show in dark bags under his eyes, or all his long, grueling years show in the creases on his forehead. Maybe the cut from his earlobe to the bottom of his chin has healed into a jagged red scar. Maybe he is thinner, the unhealthy lines of his bones visible just underneath his epidermis. But he doesn’t want to look; doesn’t want to see any of it.

_“I like you,” says Mary Morstan, John’s new best friend. Sherlock frowns, dabbing blood from his nose with a thin paper towel. “And, don’t worry, he still loves you. He’s just being stubborn; I’ll get him to come around.” She walks away smiling, leaving a confused man in her wake, nursing an unhealthy number of facial injuries. He turns thoughts over in his mind, thinking about what she had said. How could John still love him -- he’d_ died _, for god’s sakes._

He does not look at his face. Instead, his eyes focus on the lighter in his pale, bony fingers. The metal of the Zippo fogs beneath his fingertips, the flame dances above it. He knows he could break it in his hand, easily bend its weakening structure in his palm if he so wished. His fingers may be small, but his muscle still remains, strengthened by many months of working and lifting and packing around his belongings. His gaze lifts to his arm, thin enough to wrap his fingers around it to his elbow. Goosebumps litter the uncovered skin. His sleeve frays mid-bicep, torn in half not long ago by trees and thorns and fingers.

_John shakes with anger, one hand braced on the tabletop and the other curled into a fist at his side. His head is bowed low, and his voice is no more than a squeak as he says, “I can’t believe you would do that to me, Sherlock. I thought… I thought you_ loved _me.” He lifts his head slowly. Tears roll down his red cheeks as he peers at Sherlock through the blur. “You told me you loved me, didn’t you mean it?” His voice is dripping with hurt, and Sherlock can barely stand to hear it. He wants to curl into John’s arms, think happy thoughts, and shove his fingers in his ears. He hates hearing John so sound broken._

His face is small and angular. The bones stand out from his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, making shapes of his skeletal system. The ridge in his forehead above his eyes makes a triangle with his cheekbones, and he tries to find its area ( _one-half base times height equals…_ ). His eyes are cold and dead, peering back at themselves through the cold, dead glass. Their usual bright green tint is now a somber gray. The flecks of blue are now a deep raven, burnt like black ivory. The scar leading from his ear to chin is less healed than he expected it to be, though it is years old. He can still see the pink flesh below his skin, and can still remember exactly how far the knife went in, how many veins it sliced and how many stitches it took to sew it back together. If he thinks hard enough, he can recall the look on John’s face when the knife pressed into his skin. He’s tried many times to delete the memory of John’s gaping, terrified expression, but it always ends up resurfacing.

_Darkened eyes. Skin slick with sweat. Naturally steady arms shake as he holds himself up. Eerie shadows cast on their bodies, making patterns in the dark. John’s back arches like a cat stretching in the sun, each joint splaying out under the ghastly skin. He’s breathing in the crook of his neck, hot bursts of air rolling over already heated flesh. John’s voice fills the darkness, loud and pleasantly wrecked. “Oh, Sherlock! God,_ Sherlock! _” His fingers dig into John’s hips, leaving behind bruised flesh. “God, Sherlock, god, I love you…”_

Stories hide within his skin, epics in his wrinkles. He relays them all in his mind. The scar on his forehead, a pale white sliver of raised flesh, from running through London with John at his side (sidebar; a head-to-head collision with a fire escape is not an ideal story to drag to the hospital with you). The spot of permanent ink beneath his left nostril, a case gone wrong with a tattoo artist. The hatched scars below his lip, the result of a nasty forty-two hour abduction. There have been so many criminals who’ve become too cocky, leaving marks upon his flesh before they launch failed ploys to kill him. Under his left pectoral, a line of Xs and Os; across his wrists, cuts circling the entire way around; inside his right ankle, a deep stab wound. He recalls John’s lips grazing over each scar, carefully tracing each mark with his tongue. He remembers John’s sigh of perpetual annoyance each time he gained a new one. He recollects the tears in John’s eyes when Sherlock had been found each time, strapped to a pipe or a table, smiling easily and asking where he’d been. Sherlock would always wonder why John cared so much, why he’d let himself feel, but had embraced it nonetheless.

_They’re running. Not towards criminals, not through the streets of London, but from a mob of the dead. John is not smiling and Sherlock is not feeling the thrill of the game thrum beneath his skin. It is still them against the world, but it is entirely different. Glancing to his companion, Sherlock grows anxious. John’s breathing is growing heavy, and there’s a hitch in his gait that wasn’t there ten minutes ago. They lock eyes, only for a moment, and the fear in John’s eyes tells Sherlock exactly what he must do. Before he can object, Sherlock pushes John ahead, into an alleyway. “Go up the fire escape, wait until they’re gone to come down! You know where I’ll be!” he shouts over the moans and groans of the undead. He hears John shouting after him, but makes himself push forward. It is the only way to save him._

Sherlock turns his back to the mirror, fighting away tears. He flicks the lighter shut. Forcing himself to concentrate on his surroundings father than himself, he notices the blood splatters on the walls for the first time, just above the queen-sized bed. He is suddenly filled with an overwhelming hatred for the crimson stains, and blindly hurls the lighter at them. Shaking, he storms out of the room, into what once was a kitchen. Knives are missing form the counter, blood is on the cabinets, and the bread has been expired for over a year and a half. The blood almost blends in with the wood grain of the cupboard door, a nearly invisible blemish that stands out to Sherlock, mocking him. He kicks the ground once, twice, three times, his hands mindlessly pulling at his hair. He can’t stand it. Memories roll in like high tide, knocking him off his feet and onto the cold kitchen floor. He sits there, absently counting black linoleum tiles and sobbing.

_Sherlock knows the world is screwed by the admittance of the twentieth patient, though John is skeptical. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, “it’s just an outbreak. Like the flu.” At patient one hundred, John begins to wonder, and at four hundred-fifty, John knows he should’ve listened to Sherlock straight away. They pack their bags weeks before the hospitals are overrun by reanimated corpses, and flee the city months before it’s evacuated. They are joined by DI Lestrade, Anderson, Molly Hooper, and Mrs. Hudson. Anderson is the first to get infected (an oddly unsatisfying event for Sherlock), soon followed by Mrs. Hudson and Molly. They bury them wherever thy can; Anderson under a sycamore in the countryside, Mrs. Hudson beside a rusty swing set in a suburban backyard, Molly under a stop sign in the heart of a deserted town. It isn’t until Mycroft joins their band of survivors weeks later (falling into Greg’s arms, crying and beaten and bloody and wrecked) that they all know how little hope there is. Less than four months pass before Lestrade is infected and he drops to the ground, sweating and convulsing, grabbing at bloody teeth marks on his shoulder. Mycroft puts him down before turning the gun on himself._

The world is too loud and too quiet at the same time. The silence growls in Sherlock’s ears, deep and low. Though tears blur his vision, Sherlock manages to push himself from the ground and scramble out of the kitchen; but it's no use. Every wall he sees in painted with blood, every surface dripping with gore. He runs through the house, stumbling through hallways and rooms that seem to extend forever. He leaves a trail of destruction in his wake, overturned chairs, fallen portraits and paintings, and shattered ceramic lamps. Finally ( _finally_ ) he emerges on the porch, where he collapses. Sherlock pants into the wood planks, angry and confused. He wonders, not for the first time, what it is like to die.

_After sitting on a rooftop for nearly six hours, John regroups with Sherlock. The tall brooding man looms over his brother and the Detective Inspector’s graves, silent. John clears his throat, shifts his feet, a hand absentmindedly pressing to his right forearm. Sherlock does not turn to look at John, his eyes glued to the large rock they’d used as a joint-headstone all that time ago. “Can you believe it’s been years?” Sherlock mumbles, wrapping his weathered coat tighter around him. John shakes his head. Sherlock doesn’t see. He doesn’t see John shake his head, doesn’t see John clutching his arm, doesn’t see the blood spilling from beneath John’s paling fingers._

It would not be a quick death. It would be slow and painful. He would suffer like everyone else; like Lestrade and Molly and Mrs. Hudson. He would scream in agony. He would shake and spasm, foaming at the mouth, just the same as those before him. The searing heat would engulf his body, and the pain would wipe his mind like a faulty hard drive. His mind palace would dissolve into nothing, and, with a finally cry, he would turn.

_“Sherlock,” John whispers, his voice cracking. “Sherlock, I’m sorry.” Confused, Sherlock casts his eyes to the smaller man. He sees the blood leaking from John's arm, and promptly quits breathing. John wants to dive forward and comfort his partner, but he is frozen. His feet won’t move, and, as it appears, neither will Sherlock’s. They stand, yards away, and watch each other fall apart._

Sherlock tries to remember how to breathe. _Inhale_ , his mind supplies, _exhale_. The roaring in his ears has gone down and his tears are pulling to a halt, but his mind lingers. _What would it be to die?_ he ponders.

_John dies in Sherlock’s arms, his eyes wide open as he thrashes uncontrollably. Sherlock counts the seconds leading up to his partner’s death, staring straight down into his lifeless irises. He studies the brown and blue of his eyes, how the color grows lighter around his pupil, helplessly trying to commit them to memory. John goes still for a moment, before the thrashing continues, this time for a different reason._

There is a gun in the bag he’d left in the house’s bedroom. Sherlock thinks about retrieving it, pressing it against his temple. It would only take the weight of a single finger, then he’d be with his John.

_One bullet from Sherlock’s pistol, and John Watson is gone forever. Just one bullet._

Sherlock knows John wouldn’t like him thinking this way, so he makes himself stop; _I’ve got to push on_ , he tells himself, standing and brushing dust off his trousers, _for John_.

_“Um... Afghanistan,” John answers._

**The End.**

**Author's Note:**

> (i don't know if anyone noticed, but the paragraphs increase by one sentence each the farther down you go, until you get to the middle, where it remains at 12 sentences for two paragraphs, then decreases by one sentence each. thought i would let someone know because i spent, like, four hours trying to delete and add sentences so it would fit to my outlandish needs) (though, i did cheat at the end, and add an extra sentence) (i'm a rebel like that).
> 
> Hopefully that wasn't too big a mess of confuzzlement! Comment/Kudos/Bookmark if you liked it! I LOVE feedback; it's what keeps me writing! (I'm using too many exclamation marks! And I don't care!)


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